LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. The Library of Congress is the largest repository of human knowledge and creativity in the world. Located primarily in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., its collections have grown from the original 740 volumes and 3 maps acquired from a London dealer in 1801 to over 120 million items. Its mission is to make those collections available to the Congress of the United States, to the offices of the Federal Government, and to the American people and researchers from around the world.

History and Evolution of the Collections

The Library was created by two acts of Congress. The first, on 24 April 1800, in appropriating funds to relocate the national government from Philadelphia to the District of Columbia, allocated $5,000 for the purchase of books and provided for the "fitting up of a suitable apartment for containing them." The second, on 26 January 1802, provided that the president should appoint a Librarian of Congress, overseen by a Congressional joint committee. The same act granted borrowing privileges to the president and vice president.

The early collection appears to have stretched beyond "the purpose of reference" specified by President Jefferson in his recommendation to the first Librarian, John James Beckley. The initial purchase was limited to books on law, political science, economics, and history, but gifts from members of Congress and others seem to have added materials in geography, natural history, medicine, and literature. By 1812 the Library possessed three thousand volumes. Soon thereafter dramatic events forever altered the Library. The British occupied Washington, D.C., in August 1814 and burned the Capitol, destroying much of the Library's collection. After some debate, Congress agreed to replace the loss by purchasing the personal library of Thomas Jefferson, 6,487 volumes, at the cost of $23,950. The resulting Library of Congress was both twice the size of its predecessor and contained a rich selection of philosophy, classical literature, and scientific material, probably the finest collection in the country. The Library also acquired President Jefferson's method of classification, which would continue to be applied to the collections until the close of the nineteenth century.

The collections grew slowly before the Civil War. Access was broadened to include cabinet members, and in 1832, a separate law collection was created and access was given to justices of the Supreme Court. But there were losses, too. Two-thirds of the collection was destroyed by fire on Christmas Eve, 1851. Later in that decade, Congress took away the Library's role in distributing public documents, giving it to the Bureau of the Interior, and at the same time transferred the role of exchanging books with foreign institutions from the Library to the Department of State. In 1859 registration of copyrights was moved to the Patent Office, depriving the Library of the depository function that had done much to build its collections.

Significant growth in the Library began only with the appointment of Ainsworth Rand Spofford as Librarian, 1865–1897. The copyright depository program returned that same year, and the Smithsonian Institution's library was purchased the next. Spofford organized an international document exchange program and also took in several important acquisitions and gifts. The Library's 80,000 volumes of 1870 became 840,000 volumes by 1897, 40 percent of that growth coming from the copyright depository. The growth necessitated the Library's move out of the Capitol in 1897 into its new building, now called the Thomas Jefferson Building. In that same year, Congress enacted a new organization for the Library, giving the Librarian full control over the institution and subjecting his appointment to Senatorial approval.

Spofford's immediate successors, John Russell Young, 1897–1899, and Herbert Putnam, 1899–1939, continued to build the collections and undertook innovations appropriate to the Library's growing national significance. Young inaugurated national service to the blind and physically disabled. His catalogers, Charles Martel and J. C. M. Hanson, also undertook a new classification scheme, finally abandoning Jefferson's method. Putnam, the first professionally trained Librarian, initiated interlibrary loan service and began sale and distribution of the Library's printed catalog cards. He greatly expanded the Library's international exchange programs and brought in major collections of Hebrew, Indic, Chinese, and Japanese materials. In 1930 he convinced Congress to allocate $1.5 million to acquire the Vollbehr Collection of incunabula, bringing the Library one of three existing perfect vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible. In 1914, influenced by Progressive-Era developments in state libraries, Putnam created the Legislative Reference, now the Congressional Research Service, to serve the specific reference needs of the Congress. In recognition of the Library's growing contribution to the national culture, Congress created the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board in 1925, providing a mechanism for the receipt of private money gifts. Finally, as he was leaving office, Putnam bequeathed to the Library its second building. Opened in 1939 as the Annex, it is now named for President John Adams.

The Library entered a new era under the administrations of Archibald MacLeish (1939–1944), Luther Evans (1945–1953), and L. Quincy Mumford (1954–1974). As the United States became an international superpower, the Library dramatically increased its own acquisition of international documents and publications and undertook structures to assist other libraries across the country in building their international resources. Evans established a Library mission in Europe to acquire materials, inaugurated a program of blanket orders with foreign dealers around the globe, and expanded the Library's exchange program for foreign government documents. Mumford oversaw the implementation of Public Law 480, permitting the Library to use U.S.–owned foreign currency to purchase foreign publications for its own and other American library collections. In 1961 the Library established its first overseas acquisition centers in New Delhi and Cairo. Mumford also enjoyed two successes that would bear fruit under his successors: approval to build a third building, the James Madison Memorial, which opened in 1980; and establishment of the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) standard, which would provide a foundation for the computer catalogs and national databases of the next generation.

With the appointment of Daniel J. Boorstin as Librarian (1975–1987) the Library's focus returned to the national sphere, building stronger ties to Congress and expanding its relationship with the scholarly and business communities. Boorstin held luncheons, lectures, and concerts. He created a Council of Scholars to advise the Librarian, and he inaugurated the Center for the Book, a privately funded forum for discussion of the book's place in national culture. These initiatives were continued and expanded under Librarian James H. Billington (1987–). To increase private funding and enhance the Library's national visibility, Billington created the James Madison Council, an advisory board of business, philanthropic, and cultural leaders. He established an Education Office and began the use of technology to bring the Library out into the nation, digitizing the Library's resources and delivering them over the Internet.

Funding

The Library is an agency of Congress. Its primary funding derives from the annual Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, from which its various operations received more than $300 million for fiscal year 2002. But private funds represent an increasing share of the budget. The $60 million launch of the National Digital Library, for instance, received $15 million in Congressional support, the remaining $45 million raised from private donors. Annual gifts averaged $1 million in 1987, when the Library's Development Office was created. By 1997 they were exceeding $14 million.

The Collections and Their Acquisition

The Library's holdings stretch across every medium and historical age. More than 120 million items occupy approximately 530 miles of shelves. The collections include more than 18 million books, 2.5 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.5 million maps, 54 million manuscripts, a half-million motion pictures, and over 5,600 incunabula. Outside the fields of agriculture and medicine, where it defers to the national libraries in those fields, its stated mission is to build "a comprehensive record of American history and creativity" and "a universal collection of human knowledge." While its greatest strengths lie in American history, politics, and literature, it also possesses extraordinary collections in the history of science, the publications of learned societies around the world, and bibliography in virtually every subject. Two-thirds of its books are in foreign languages. Its Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Polish collections are the largest out-side those countries, and its Arabic holdings are the largest outside of Egypt.

The Library's collections are built from a complex network of sources. More than 22,000 items arrive each day. About 10,000 are retained for the permanent collections. Gifts, an important component of the Library's growth from the beginning, remain significant. The copyright depository program is the largest single feature of the acquisitions program. The depository does not generate a national collection of record, as Library selectors are not bound to retain all copyrighted items received. Current practice retains approximately two-thirds of copyright receipts. There are over 15,000 agreements with foreign governments and research institutions, and the library also receives publications from the governments of all fifty states and from a wide range of municipal and other government units. Overseas offices acquire materials from over sixty countries for the Library and for other American libraries through the Cooperative Acquisition Program. Approval plans, blanket and standing orders with foreign vendors complete the collection.

Place in National Culture and Education

The Library has been at the center of national library culture at least since 1901, when it began distributing its catalog cards to libraries around the nation. Recent changes in cataloging practices have reduced the Library's near-complete domination of cataloging, but its role in setting national bibliographic standards remains pivotal. The Library has also played a central role in the development of standards for the presentation and exchange of digital information.

Yet, however expansive the vision of Librarians like Spofford, Putnam, MacLeish, and Mumford, the Library was the realm of researchers fortunate enough to visit its Washington home and long stood remote from the broader national culture. That situation changed dramatically in the last decades of the twentieth century. From Daniel Boorstin's creation of the Center for the Book in 1977 to his appointment of Robert Penn Warren as the nation's first poet laureate in 1986, the Library took a place at the center of national intellectual life. That role has expanded dramatically under Billington with the emergence of the Internet as a vehicle for making the Library's collections accessible to Americans in their homes and offices. Thomas, the Library's legislative information service, provides ready access to Congressional documents. The American Memory exhibit has made many of the Library's historical documents, photographs, and sound and video collections available to every citizen with computer access. America's Story is a web site designed specifically for young people, putting the Library's resources in a form even young children can enjoy. Together these resources have revolutionized the Library and its relationship with the nation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cole, John Y. Jefferson's Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress. Washington: Library of Congress, 1993. Also available on the Library's web site, at: http://www.loc.gov/loc/legacy/.

Cole, John Y., ed. The Library of Congress in Perspective: A Volume Based on the Reports of the 1976 Librarian's Task Force and Advisory Groups. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1978.

Conaway, James. America's Library: The Story of the Library of Congress, 1800–2000. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Goodrum, Charles A., and Helen W. Dalrymple. The Library of Congress. Boulder: Westview, 1982.

Highsmith, Carol M., and Ted Landphair. The Library of Congress: America's Memory. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1994.

Mearns, David C. The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress, 1800–1946. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1947.

U.S. Library of Congress. Annual Report of the Librarian. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1886–.

Michael E.Stoller

See alsoLibraries .